Never After: a few thoughts
Sunday I saw Never After. It's cute and bouncy. Much of the music is fun; the orchestra was excellent. It pushed at my definition of 'fairy tale' -- I think it isn't quite one, to me, but instead belongs over in whatever one calls the space Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are in
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I think you're mistaken about Les reacting to falling in love with Somnia in the way that she would react to falling in love with a man -- in my read, the "I kissed a miss" song/scene is definitely supposed to be "hey, girls aren't supposed to fall in love with each other, and I wasn't supposed to fall in love at all, but boy that was nice...maybe that's why I never wanted to love men." (Over the course of the scene.)
But I was somewhat bothered by the conflation of lesbian with butch/"plucky"/liberated/feminist. (Especially as I grew up on stories like Petronella, which is the girls-can-play-the-prince-role with straight heroine paradigm.) And the fact that Somnia totally rejects being anything but the pretty-and-boring-princess that has been presented as *yucky* throughout the show. On the one hand, OK, it's good to say you can be a girly lesbian too...but on the other hand, I didn't believe in her, or her and Les having anything to say to each other, and it made Les more of an *exception* and less of a paradigm changer.
I thought the class stuff did not work well at all -- revolutions too easy, too easily resolved, and of course the heroine is still a princess even if she's "renounced her title" so PC glow gets conflated with class privilege. (Gender and class roles *are* challenged, all over the place -- but not with an entirely consistent message in the end.)
The racial casting issue did also bother me, but it's a weird logistical issue in a mostly-but-not-entirely-white group. Do you try to consider race? Do you try to be color-blind? Trouble either way. Same actress was cast as Juror #8 in 12 Angry Jurors and as the Preacher/Judge in Rimers -- each of those being odd along a different axis, to have the only black actor playing the role (but not in such an obviously *problematic* way). (For data: Hans-the-stableboy was Hispanic, or at least, I imagine he'd identify that way. Ditto Somnia, though I know even less about how she self-identifies. At least one chorus member was asian-american and one of the chorus-with-lines was Russian, which I don't know if you're counting in the tally.)
I confess to not thinking about the kissing-Somnia-without-her-permission issue. Interesting argument. I suppose it does come across as an instance of "Les wants to play the male role, rather than wanting to generally change the paradigm." The Les-as-bait gambit read to me more as exploiting other people's sexist assumptions than anything else, but you're right that they could have just used her as one of the guys and done a straight robbery and they chose to use her gender as a resource instead.
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I was, of course, imagining Somnia running the kingdom while her sweetie was off adventuring.
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She's a Princess -- she has poise, and lots of it.
imagining Somnia running the kingdom while her sweetie was off adventuring
If the story had given even a little nod to her competence at anything but embroidery ... I would have loved to see her step up as a mediator for the siege, for example, and thus wind up with some responsibilities.
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Yeah. And I had to wrestle for a while about what casting a black woman in that role would do to the production before making that casting choice. And I've had several people say to me since then that they felt it didn't work... or, at least, that my directing failed to account properly for either Juror #8's gender or race. (shrug)
I dunno. As you say, racial casting is a tricky issue. Especially in a community that values a level of race-blindness that it doesn't actually possess.
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On an unrelated note, "hispanic" as a race always completely baffles me, as it seems to include people who ancestors come from Europe, Africa, and the Americas plus various combinations thereof.
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As it happens, for US government purposes, ethnicity and race are two different things, with a bunch of different racial categories and only two ethnic categories: "Hispanic/Latino" and "Not Hispanic/Latino".
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I think it's possible but difficult for a story to be both. I have quirky fairy tale aesthetics.
mistaken about Les reacting to falling in love with Somnia
Perhaps. Before she was fairy-zotted to be a lesbian, she was fairy-zotted to love only one person ever, and to have better things to do than sit around the house waiting for her true love find her. I think she still would have been hostile toward anyone making romantic overtures toward her, and pole-axed on finding the her one true love.
bothered by the conflation of lesbian with butch/"plucky"/liberated/feminist
Yeah, stacking those all up as if they were a package deal did not please me, either. (Petronella was a favorite on my childhood reading list, too, and definitely a running comparison with this.)
Nobody but Les has been rejecting femme princesses as yucky -- all the princes want one!
I didn't believe in her, or her and Les having anything to say to each other
After the wedding is always outside the scope of fairy tales. What are an 'ordinary' prince and princess going to have to say to each other, either? (Another book I'm fond of covered zooshed through everything up to winning the princess's hand in marriage in the first chapter, and then spent the rest of the book on them actually talking to each other, figuring out how they were going to live together, deal with court politics, manage a barony ...)
made Les more of an *exception* and less of a paradigm changer
Was she not supposed to be an exception? This princess is not like all those other princesses (and things still work out okay for her) seemed to be the message of the day.
Gender and class roles *are* challenged, all over the place -- but not with an entirely consistent message in the end.
Where? Ms. Revolutionary is the only one who strikes me as challenging gender roles with a seemingly egalitarian marriage. Her revolution, while it has a moment, promptly hands things back over to royalty. Matilde has been patiently waiting for Robinson for who-knows-how-long, and runs off to join him as soon as he suggests it. She might be challenging class roles, or perhaps she's earlier in her story and will make her way through her transformation in the woods and return home with her properly gentrified fiance.
The racial casting issue did also bother me, but it's a weird logistical issue
It is, but I wish it had been noted somehow -- "Yes, we thought about this, and this is why we did it anyway". I'm not sure how to do that preemptively in a way that doesn't come across as defensive or confrontational.
I missed the Asian-American in the chorus, and would probably parse Russian as caucasian. Hispanic is a designation for which I haven't learned visible markers -- as far as I can tell, it means some of your ancestors at some point lived in Spain or Portugal or somewhere colonized by one of those?
kissing-Somnia-without-her-permission
This struck me in part because Les dished out such a lecture on entitlement to Robinson. Story-wise, she has to kiss Somnia, but taking a moment to consider whether Somnia would approve and/or whether it was an appropriate course of action given the options would have made Les seem a bit more thoughtful & shown some sign of respect for others rather than just her own sense of entitlement to life her way.
more as exploiting other people's sexist assumptions
It was that, too, but it was also *not* showing off Les's supposed newly arrived badass combat skills, and having her voluntarily take up, however briefly, the femme presentation that she's been fleeing. Robinson seeing her as a girl and using her as such probably factors in, too, but that isn't displayed until afterward. (While I'm at it, why is the leader of the very merry men straight? The gay guys aren't man enough to be in charge? Mathilde wouldn't run off to be with a mere lieutenant bandit -- he has to be number one to be worthy of the aristocratic girlfriend? His hitting on Les has the additional rank/power dynamic that way ... but that whole scene felt like it was pulled from a "defending yourself against harassment" presentation.)
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Robinson being straight and the VMM gay did strike me. As with the revolution, i think the reasons are structural/serving other story purposes: wanting to have someone be guy-hitting-on-Les and specifically to set up the expectation of romance like it might be in another story, to turn it on its head; wanting to play with the Robin-Hood-and-Marion trope (Cee said that naming her Mathilde and the dress-as-a-page thing were from actual historical versions of the Robin Hood stories).... I suspect she wasn't thinking about how it looks to have the straight guy in charge of the gay guys. (Though, that said, my absolute favorite bit in the show is the scene where the VMM try to warn Robinson off of hitting on Les, and I'd be sad to see it go.)
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Shallow and political commentary don't always play well together, alas. Most of the modern fairy tales (or fairy tale based stories) that I've read have a lot more depth of character than classic fairy tales for much that reason. That said, why hand the kingdom back to Les at the end? What has she done to demonstrate suitability for the job? Or if she is elected by public acclaim as the hero, how about a nod to next year/generation, given that she won't be having kids and will probably get restless pinned to the castle governing. "I'll do it this year while you guys study up on government."
Could the dynamic of Robinson hitting on Les have worked if he were the second or third in command of the band, instead of the leader?
That was a good song. :)
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